What if you were given a million dollars to promote your brand? What would you do? Would you create a television campaign like McGuigan just have or would you hire yourself an agency to create some killer content designed to go viral on social media sending your brand into the popular culture stratosphere?

If you chose the latter, your chances are slim. Corporates have spent billions on creating social media content but consumers plain haven’t turned up. Take Coca-Cola for example. In 2011 Jonathan Mildenhall announced that Coke would continually produce “the world’s most compelling content” which would capture a “disproportionate share of popular culture” and that Coke would “double sales by 2020”.

According to the Harvard Business Review’s March 2016 edition, Coca-Cola’s online digital magazine ‘Journey’ hasn’t cracked the top 20,000 web sites globally and its YouTube channel is ranked #2749.

This is because ‘Crowd Culture’ is creating the most compelling content, not corporates. One of the best ways to see this in the flesh is to go to a Rugby 7s tournament. Now I know that many of you will be thinking that this is the worst idea that you’ve heard in 40 editions of this newsletter but bear with me.

Once upon a time, you would go to the football, whatever the code, and unless it was the half time show at the Super Bowl, you would witness something so random and unbelievably awful that you wouldn’t know where to look.

Sort of like those videos where the winemaker goes to the shed to draw a glass of wine with a pipet that you can’t see properly, that you can’t smell and that you can’t taste only to be spoken to in a language that makes you (being the average consumer in this case) feel completely inadequate.

Now, you go to that 7s tournament and the ‘Crowd’ is the entertainment. By some magic, every single time the camera lands on someone, they’re doing something that brings a smile to (almost) everyone’s faces.

Everyone is involved, everyone is engaged and everyone, young and old, leaves having had a fantastic time, even if they slept through the final. This is because the crowd, collectively, is a much better judge of what is ‘entertainment’ than event management and sponsors.

So who are those crowds in relation to wine and Social Media? What are they interested in? How can we meaningfully participate in their world rather than trying to drag them kicking and screaming into ours? Click here to continue reading

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